Back of December 18, 2009, the Washington Post ran an editorial E-mail furor doesn't alter evidence for climate change by Penn State’s Dr. Michael Mann, who attempted to explain why the recent release of the Climategate emails “doesn’t alter evidence for climate change.” But Dr. Mann—a central figure in the released emails—is speaking only from one side of the issue—his side. While the contents of the Climategate emails may not alter the evidence of climate change published in the scientific “peer-reviewed” literature, it is an entirely different matter when it comes to evidence of climate change that may have been kept out of the peer-reviewed literature. And the Climategate emails illuminate continual efforts from Dr. Mann and colleagues to limit the contents of the peer-reviewed scientific literature to only those types of results and conclusions that they liked. As such, the extant scientific literature of the past 5 to 10 years cannot be considered to be a fair representation of what it would have been had it not been manipulated. Thus, it is impossible to judge whether or not the evidence for climate change has been altered by the Climategate emails, contrary to Dr. Mann’s claims.

Below is a letter-to-the editor of the Washington Post that I submitted is response to Dr. Mann’s December 18th op-ed. Since it has been more than 10 days since I submitted it, I’ll assume that the Post has decided not to run it (they did not run any letter-to-the-editor on this topic, despite having received 651 comments on-line, the majority of them quite negative). My letter is reproduced here:

» How much "Man Made" CO2 Is In The Earth's Atmosphere?
I think ALL of the CO2 in the Earth's Atmosphere is from man.
I'm not sure how much "Man Made" CO2 is in the Earth's Atmosphere.
There is .04% CO2 in the Earth's Atmosphere and of that "Man" has added an extra 4% (1 part in 62,500)